


Oil in the Lungs

by jribbing



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mother's Day, Parent Dean Winchester, Podfic Available, Protective Dean Winchester, Season/Series 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23746396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jribbing/pseuds/jribbing
Summary: Some say cruelty is an art. Some say it's an accident. Usually, it's both at the same time. Dean thought he wanted this. Dean thought he needed this.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 54
Kudos: 196





	Oil in the Lungs

**Author's Note:**

> "It's not okay to intervene on behalf of someone else's body."
> 
> Set early season 12 (ignores the canon timeline, since Mother's Day would have been near the end of season 12, or thereabouts).

It’s not the same thing. 

Dean has never had much use for Mother’s Day. He spent most years trying to ignore any and all significant dates and holidays, and yearning for Sam to do the same. He fell short, however, of ever asking that of his little brother outright. There was enough ineffable, festering pain as it was, and he was smart enough to recognize that the spilling over of his own bitter, experienced grief into the burgeoning of Sam’s inchoate grief would be a mess neither he nor their father could even begin to clean up or ameliorate. Sam strong-armed him into helping with at least two biology projects on the ecological effects of oil spills on marine wildlife — 

“ _Didn’t you do this last month?”_

_“Different school, Dean.”_

_“That sucks. S’like you’re stuck in the worst version of groundhog day. Can’t you just give the same exact speech?”_

_“No, that’s plagiarism.”_

_“How?”_

_“Self-plagiarism.”_

_“You can’t plagiarize yourself.”_

_“You can, actually.”_

_“Bullshit.”_

_“It’s like when you recycle the same cheesy lines on all the girls.”_

_“Hey, those lines work, all right, smartass? And I didn’t come up with them anyway.”_

_“You’re right, sorry, guess that’s just straight up plagiarism. Congrats.”_

In any case, Dean knows a thing or two about mass (environmental) pollution. Knows a thing or two about being up to his knees in it, mostly of his own making. Mother’s Day was relegated to the utterly unsalvageable long before Sam could even walk, relegated to that saturated list of desiderium. John’s regiment had little to do with recovery and everything to do with alternative energy. Under the potent influence of the insidious power of approval, Dean could pretend the ocean didn’t even exist. Sam simply was incapable. Sam would readily walk into the ocean to prove it was there.

“ _Your brother gets lost in his nonsense,”_ John said, others said, so many have said throughout the decades in one form or the other.

Surprising, and not surprising in the least, when they scrutinize one another and think each other’s thoughts and share each other’s experiences, and still consistently mischaracterize a crucial element.

No one is getting lost. No one has ever been ‘getting lost’. Dean shunts a bag over his head, primarily to get some goddamn shut-eye. And Sam walks into oceans, primarily to get Dean to admit the ocean is there, to get Dean to look at it, to get Dean to come a bit closer and breathe some better air. Yet it always ends with both of them covered in crude infested saltwater, trudging defeated and exhausted back to shore.

Old habits die hard. Winchester habits don’t die at all.

“It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday.” Sam’s voice is whisper-thin. Dean has a beautiful bead on the heart of the adumbrated target, the concrete ledge of the shooting range digging into the front of his thighs. His trigger finger twitches, pauses.

When Sam starts tiptoeing around, Dean deduces he ought to feel guilty about something. The safety flicks on, he glances over. His little brother leans in the doorway, sleep-soft. He’s bleeding a classic mix of hesitance and earnestness and weariness. 

Dean’s chest cavity closes in. Mother’s Day. The tracts of his brain can’t commiserate. What is being chased after, what should be being chased after, what requires redefining? He came down here to shoot his gun...a lot. Because he’s sick and tired of redefining, and sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Sam fidgets in the extended hiatus, examines his toes. “Was thinking you could ask her to stop in. For dinner, maybe watch a movie?” 

And as soon as the idea vibrates against Dean’s eardrums, it seems so easy. That’s all it is. Mother’s Day — spend time with your mother, because his mother is here, alive, on this earth. He nods, nods again, and then can’t stop grinning. “Yeah...yeah Sammy, that sounds good. Great even.”

Sam smiles back, in that manner where his eyes crinkle at the sides (because he’s older now, older than Dean in some ways) and his head tilts like he’s the only one with a clear view of Dean. “So you’ll text her?”

His phone is already in his grasp, swiping out of ‘Words with Friends’ and back to his ongoing thread with Mary. They’d been texting only an hour ago. Sam had blended up a bright green, monster of a smoothie, and tried to persuade Dean to have some. Dean had snapped a picture and sent it to his mom, captioned: “save me.” She’d replied with a teasing picture of her own —- her bacon-heavy, grease-laden, diner breakfast, captioned: “no rabbit food allowed here.”

In a matter of seconds, it’s done. “She’s down, says she can make dinner and stay the night Sunday.”

Dean looks up, and glimpses a version of his brother that is both familiar and foreign, like peering through a pinhole into the past. Sam swallows, chews on his bottom lip, still smiling — but painful, forced. “Great...that’s great. She’s okay, then? No trouble?”

Dean squints. They’re close, maybe four feet apart; an autonomic ligament is tugging on his lens. He should be focusing on something, yet his vision refuses to accommodate and it’s all blurry instead. “You mean since this morning? No, ‘course not. She would have called, anyway.”

A brief instance where Sam makes eye contact, and perhaps it should have been obvious. He laughs, hollow, retracting his body in a slow-crawl sequence, battle-wounded, or arthritic, or both, “Right, right, I know, of course. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it.”

Dean is alone. He stares blankly at the doorway for an indeterminate amount of time. Breathes in, breathes out, breathes in, breathes out. It’s not the same thing. He tastes petroleum.

_“Did Dad say he’d be home by next week?”_

_“No, don’t be stupid. Said he might need me to meet up, though, tie up loose ends.”_

_“So...he didn’t say anything...about next week?”_

_“No, Sam, he never says anything about anything, why the fuck would he start now?”_

_“That’s not true.”_

_“What’s not true?”_

_“He says stuff. To you.”_

_“Okay, well, do you wanna hop on the phone with him, then, because he’s not exactly a great conversationalist.”_

_“That’s not the point.”_

_“Then what is the point?”_

Sam was young, fourteen. No, thirteen. Because he turned fourteen the following Friday. Their pseudo-argument had terminated then, because his little brother never answered. Dean had thought Sam was being irrationally difficult, had been poking and riling for a fight. Yet the expression on his face was a homologous solution of disappointment and confusion. It was a long while before Dean realized that half of those apparent emotions were aimed at him. It was an even longer while before Dean recognized any of his own culpability, because how much more could he possibly give to his brother? He wanted things too. He needed things too.

Dean’s certain he’s ceased inspiration; his diaphragm stutters as if denervated and he’s sweating — bitter and sticky.

His brother, barefoot at 10:30 AM in the yellow overhead light of the bunker, speaking of their mom and treating Dean as an uncrossable bridge — an incarnation of who he’d been as John’s youngest son.

Dean’s phone buzzes. It’s a notification, from the game. Mary’s made a move. Dean shoves his temporal displacement deep into the caves of history, wrings himself out, and decides it’s not the same thing. It’s not the same thing.

* * *

The energy Sam exudes over the week is nigh intolerable. Sheer nervous excitement. Dean is anticipating it too — his first ‘real’ Mother’s Day — but there is a resigned desperation about his brother, and it’s disconcerting. Dean itches to tell him to chill out, itches to tell him to relax, but he is one hundred percent confident he lacks the ability to do that without sounding like a dick. So he steps aside, watches Sam prepare as an inexperienced nester, and declines to acknowledge the sickly warm fondness that thaws his visceral organs. Sam is a grown man. They’re both grown men. Why is any of this hard and/or fraught?

Sam cleans the biggest guest room, makes the bed military standard (marine standard). Dean observes him carefully select his three favorite books — the ones he re-reads over and over again — and arrange them on the dresser in plain view. They’re some of the scarce possessions he’s ever truly owned.

“I don’t think Mom is going to mainline three books in five hours like you do, geek-boy.” Dean jabs, gently, without teeth.

Sam shrugs, undeterred, “Maybe she’ll want to borrow them.”

He raises an eyebrow, “You burst a blood vessel the one time I even touched those. But Mom gets borrowing privileges?”

“You let her borrow your tapes, didn’t you?” Sam counters.

“Yeah, because she actually appreciates good music.” Dean fires back, with ease

“And maybe she actually appreciates good literature. Or, you know, literature at all.” A real dimple, one that turns into two when Dean flips him off and makes a flourishing, flawless exit. He’d rather this breed of frantic, obsessive eagerness than the specimen of psychic scar tissue he’d choked on before. It’s not the same thing. This is different. She might borrow the books. She might love those books as much as Sam does, as much as she loves the same music, and food, and cars as Dean does. Strokes, folks. Adage, adage, adage.

Sam ensures every single entity in the entire compound is spick and span. He stocks the bathroom with female toiletries. He buys them beer, and bacon, and apple pie, and convinces Dean to let him cook the one dish he's legitimately mastered how to make — mustard glazed chicken. Dean knows it’s Jess’s recipe. Knows Sam has a treasured, stained little index card, half in Jess’s mother’s scrawl, half in Jess’s own.

He doesn’t even attempt a fake argument for red meat. “Sure, all right. Want me to show you how to turn on the oven?”

This time, it’s Sam who walks away with the raised middle finger.

Dean vacates the vicinity, settles in the war room with a glass of whiskey, content, yet unsettled. Maybe unsettled by the close proximity, or potentiality, for contentedness. He can hear pots, or pans, and Sam is humming out of tune. He studies the amber liquid, swirls it between his cheeks, and evaluates the difference between acquiescence and coalescence (or an approximation of those notions). “Jesus christ,” he mumbles, sipping heartily. That’s when he sees it. The shoebox perched at the end of the map, with a note atop the lid. 

He slides the object closer, immediately zeroing in on Sam’s scribble.

_Happy Mother’s Day! I never thought I’d have the chance to say that to you, or give these to you, and I’m so thankful we have you back. Love, Sam._

Dean shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t. He concedes he shouldn’t...but he does. He pops open the box. Cards...cards upon cards upon cards. Mother’s Day cards. His pale hands rifle through them, one at a time. A scant are home-made, via crayons and felt and sloppy glue — stick figures and a child’s artistic sensibility. The rest are a hodgepodge of hallmark quality and gas-station quality, the products of his little brother’s scrounged savings. Dean tracks the linear progression easily, by the caliber of Sam’s penmanship and vocabulary. Some are dated, the majority aren’t.

_Happy Mother’s Day! Wish you were here. Love you._

_Happy Mother’s Day! I hope I’m making you proud. Love you._

_Happy Mother’s Day! We miss you. Love you._

_Happy Mother’s Day!_

_Love you!_

_Thinking of you!_

_Happy…_

_Love…_

_Day…_

_Miss…_

Dean seals the box with violent intensity, his skin chemical burned, blister red. He’s split open, cracked, weeping fluid, raw, ambushed by a demonic infarction, and he hates every fucking aspect of the past thirty seconds. He had craved some hard alcohol before. It’s a goddamn government mandate now.

His phone vibrates, ruptures into the reverie, then keeps vibrating. Incoming call. He steps outside himself, grants a lesser gear, one with degrees of mental separation, the permission to commandeer control.

“Hello? Mom?”

 _“Hey Dean.”_ Soothing, that tone, having been partitioned to dreams and a half-forgotten heaven for so long.

“You close? Hope you’re hungry, Sammy says dinner will be done in about thirty.” He can’t tear his gaze off the present. He can barely move, barely coerce his tongue to function.

 _“Oh, that’s nice. I didn’t realize he...anyway, I’m actually having a bit of car trouble. I’m at that truck stop, on 36. Think you could swing by?”_ Familiar...foreign.

It’s not the same thing.

“No problem. We’ll head your way.”

_“Just you should be fine, if anything you can just pick me up. That way Sam can finish cooking.”_

It’s not the same thing. “Okay, sit tight. See ya soon.”

_“Thanks, see you.”_

It’s not the same thing. So why does it feel like it when he pokes his head into the kitchen and tells his brother the state of affairs. Sam — fourteen, no thirteen, making double-edged points with lethal accuracy, gliding through Dean’s orbit without translation, and secretly crafting/buying fucking Mother’s Day cards for twenty-nine years. 

Dean repeats it like a mantra, in his brain, cycling through every justification he can come up with. Mary hugs him wholeheartedly — a mother’s hug, ready and warm and open. Dean has so much spilling over his internal ventricles, he can’t even begin to articulate to her what is going on beneath the surface. What he needs from her, here, in this moment, on a day designed for her. Because that’s not fair. Because when has anything ever been fair?

He opens up the hood of her clunker. She finds what’s wrong before he does. She tells a story about John, about getting a flat tire on the side of the interstate in the pouring rain, about them screaming at one another over pointless competing agendas, about how they had to call a tow truck, and wait three hours, soaked to the bone, and then when the mechanic finally showed up, he called John a _hippie_. She does an impression of his father’s scandalized reaction, and makes Dean laugh so hard he nearly throws up.

Dusk encroaches, her pupils narrowed in an electrically conspiratorial fissure as she suggests, “I could really go for a burger. And fries.”

So they go for a burger. And fries. And split a slice of warm, cherry cobbler with vanilla-bean ice cream. It’s a fallacious bastion to lean so heavily against, but Dean can’t stop looking at her, can’t stop listening to her, can’t stop vacuuming up whatever _this_ is with the integrity of a black hole. “Happy Mother’s Day.” It’s the first time he can ever remember delivering it, ever remember his lips shaping the giant phrase, and he’s delivering it to her face, with less than twenty-four inches between them. It’s perfect, elementally perfect, yet it’s unrefined in a fundamentally corporeal way. The uncanny valley of retread territory and liminal space.

She scrapes the metal spoon across the bowl, jarringly, and considers. The angle of her ear reminds him who is absent. “I know...well, you’ve been patient with me. I know it hasn’t been what you thought, or I’m not what you thought.” He shakes his head then, as if it isn’t true, as if this isn’t an elaborate, three dimensional display of it in action, as if the feet inside her boots aren’t made of clay. “I’m proud of you, you know. Your dad was proud too, would still be. I just...it’s hard. Being back here, and everything moves so fast now.” She squeezes his hand, at the junction of his wrist, “You make it easier though.”

He thinks he offers an, “I understand,” because he _does_ understand, broadly. But he doesn’t understand at all, specifically. He probably offers, “I do my best,” because that resonates easier, and he makes it easier, right? He’s easier. He’s the easier son.

It’s not the same thing.

It’s dark (somehow it’s gotten dark), genuinely dark — a satisfied blanket of evening chill muting the echoes of the nearby passing vehicles. Her keys jingle in her clutch — an auditory cue, a warning. She’s not coming back with him. He doesn’t even ask. She was never coming back with him. “I’m beat. I think I’ll just grab a room close by, that way I can hit the road early.”

A second hug, as good as the first. And then she’s gone. And then he’s returned to the Impala, an empty passenger slot to his right, her disapproving rumble beneath his seat. Twenty minutes later, the bunker door screeches shut behind him. It can’t be determined if he’d invited the abrupt cold in his wake, or if it had already disseminated long before he’d taken leave. There’s no more shoebox on the war room worktop. The kitchen is dim, shuttered. He opens the fridge — dinner and dessert, plated and untouched. He lingers outside Sam’s room a very, very long time. His shadow is long too, and he thinks about the nature of a long shadow, with its long responsibilities, with its long, attached, sorry excuse of a human.

He thinks about the impacted nature of man-made disasters, about branching tendrils of inky ruin in pristine, living waters, about the recycled oxygen in his paper-bag mask, about his obstinately empathetic brother, swimming out into the black without a lick of fear because he has unshakable faith Dean will come and fetch him.

Sam is curled on his side, rib cage expanding and depressing in the steady rhythm of aerobic condition. His Mother’s Day package has been carefully slotted into the corner of his desk. His favorite books have returned to their usual home on his nightstand. Dean doesn’t have to wonder how long Sam waited before putting things away, or if he waited at all. Because he gets it now. Familiar, because these were their scripted parts — _“Your brother gets lost in his nonsense.”_ Foreign, because Dean was just told by a mother who was risen from the dead as a literal gift for him that she was proud of him. He wants that. He needs that. He thought he wanted that. He thought he needed that.

It’s not the same thing...but it is _the exact same thing_. 

Dean pries Sam’s shoes off, then pries his jacket off, then pries his phone from his loose-gripped care. The screen is open on a long chain of texts to their mom. Unanswered texts, spanning the last several weeks. One every few days, checking in, sending information based on what Dean has relayed to Sam about Mary’s hunts and location and general well-being.

He shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn't. He’d learned his lesson, hadn’t he? With the shoebox? Hadn’t he? It’s not the same thing.

Dean scrolls. Reads them all. One of the initial messages is a link...to ‘Words with Friends’: _Hey, hope you reached Cleveland all right. Dean told me you used to like scrabble. This is a game you can play on your phone, like scrabble, but with strangers or with people you know. I’m on there too. Call if you need anything, be safe._

He puts the phone down after contemplating nestling it back into Sam’s pliant hold to avoid his brother surmising he had snooped. Invading Sam’s privacy is the least worst sin he’s committed today, so he forgoes unilateral pretense.

“She okay?” Sam — whisper-thin. Tiptoeing. Dean understands, now.

Dean stares at his brother. It’s been a rough year. It’s been a rough five years, ten years, twenty. No matter the reason — hell, purgatory, both. There are countless reasons, will always be countless reasons, for the inherent difficulty of ripping their eyelids open in the mornings. There’s only ever been a solitary, ineluctable reason that makes it bearable, though. Today is not that reason. Nor was John. And nor is Mary. It’s so simple, Dean decides. He’ll do it right. He can do this right.

“Yeah. Crappy battery. Took longer than we thought, but I managed to get it going. She wasn't feelin' good, wanted to get a motel room, hit the hay early. Real sorry she missed the chicken, though, said it sounded awesome.” He must have devoured something poisonous, given the mechanisms of it grinding up his throat with concerted effort.

“You wish her happy Mother’s Day?”

“ _Yes_ , geez, Sammy, I’m not that incompetent.”

He can’t quite discern Sam’s features, but he detects the invisible twinkle nonetheless. “You saying you’re a little incompetent?”

“Funny. That’s funny. I’ll give you that one, Seinfeld. But at least I’m not a brat.” He flicks Sam’s shoulder, yet doesn’t retract his hand, instead choosing to lay his palm flat, absorbing the heartbeat and its reassuring, defiant implications. “You gonna pitch a fit if I have half that apple pie for breakfast?”

“Not if you actually try the smoothie this time instead of pouring it in the sink and lying.” Sam croaks, drowsy.

“Deal. And I don’t know what you're on about. I don’t do that.”

“Hmmm...so what’s it taste like, then?”

“Best guess? Ass.”

Sam chuckles. Dean senses him drift further away. He listens to the ticking of the clock. Glares at the shoebox — some sort of quadrilateral amalgamation of his every mortal enemy. His fingers tighten, unconsciously, then consciously. “You too.” Sam — whisper-thin.

“Me too, what?”

A long pause. Dean almost concludes Sam is asleep, almost prods him. Then, still gossamer, yet profoundly nail-to-the-skull clear, like standing beneath the boundless blue, “Happy Mother’s Day.”

It’s not the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing. There’s sand between their toes, an exploded rig on the offing, and oil in the sacs of their lungs. But their bodies are engines, have always been engines, so they keep breathing, they’ll keep breathing, and they’ll do this again.

**END**

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Oil in the Lungs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23761150) by [jribbing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jribbing/pseuds/jribbing)




End file.
